Nick struggled to keep his lips in a straight line. He’d certainly had a hard one with Evie, not that she’d complained. He hadn’t expected her to be a virgin. That made him feel even more privileged. She had trusted him to be her first lover. He blinked away a tear.
‘Listen,’ his grandfather continued. ‘You had a bad time on Sunday night. You should talk to me, get it off your chest. Believe me, you’ll feel better.’
‘OK, Gramps. Maybe later.’
‘Whenever you want, lad.’ There was hint of disappointment in the major general’s voice.
Minutes later Nick was walking into the Abbey School. He was immediately surrounded by friends wanting to know what had happened with the police – he’d kept his phone off when he was with Evie and afterwards. He was embarrassed to find that he’d become even more of a hero. At least no one knew about him and Evie. That was one thing he was going to keep to himself. Some secrets were good.
36
‘All right, people, gather round.’ Heck Rutherford, grey-faced, was leaning against the wall at the front of the MCU. Morrie Sutton and his team were on his left, and Joni Pax with her people to the right. It was nine a.m. and the holiday weekend meant that things had piled up. Officers had been in since eight a.m., collating reports and making their own to-do lists for Heck’s approval.
Heck looked at Joni. ‘By some miracle the bank holiday weekend was pretty quiet – at least outside Corham.’
‘So it seems,’ she agreed. ‘Uniform were out in force and there were several arrests for drunk and disorderly and damage to property.’ She glanced at the young man standing beside her. ‘DS Rokeby has something to report.’
Heck waited for Peter ‘Pancake’ Rokeby to speak. He’d had him on his team in Newcastle and found him a solid performer. He’d taken some stick when other officers discovered he was gay, but he stood up to it well. ACC Dickie had been keen to have him at Corham because of her diversity drive. His nickname referred to his predilection for the food item, though some smartass had claimed it referred to make-up. Pete whispered something that made the guy blush like a schoolgirl, refusing afterwards to say what it was. He was a good man, Pete – discreet but deadly.
‘Em, yes, ma’am,’ Rokeby said. One of his few weaknesses was discomfort with public speaking. He could question a suspect as effectively as the next officer, but he hated addressing the morning meeting.
‘Come on, Detective Sergeant, we haven’t got all day.’
Heads turned and people took in Ruth Dickie, who had slipped into the room.
‘No, ma’am. I mean, yes, ma’am. Traffic police up in Alnwick stopped a driver in a BMW speeding on the A1. He was doing over a hundred. When they went to breathalyse him, one of the officers saw the grip of a pistol sticking out beneath the front seat. They managed to immobilise the guy and cuff him. He refused to answer questions, didn’t even give his name – just said the name of a Newcastle brief.’
‘What name?’ Heck asked.
‘Richard Lennox.’
There were groans around the room. Lennox was notorious for his list of criminal clients, many of whom he’d kept out of jail by practices that came close to getting him disciplined. He benefited from the criminals’ large financial resources, which enabled him to hire the sharpest legal minds, as well as former detectives now working as private investigators.
‘The superintendent at Alnwick let the driver call Lennox, who arrived an hour later. By then, as well as the pistol, nearly a kilo of cocaine had been found in the BMW. The man is foreign, probably Albanian. He’s been charged with possession of the weapon and drugs and is in custody.’
‘Interesting.’ ACC Dickie walked to the front of the room and stood next to Heck, with whom she exchanged glances before continuing. ‘Albanians seem to be flavour of the weekend.’ There was a hint of excitement in her voice. ‘DCI Rutherford, you’d better send our resident Italian speaker to Alnwick to see if she can get anything out of this latest miscreant.’
Heck nodded at Joni, then looked to her side. ‘Pan … DS Rokeby, you go too.’
‘Any further developments with the Albanians here, DI Pax?’ the ACC asked.
Joni saw Morrie Sutton’s cheeks redden – he resented being overlooked, but that wasn’t her fault. She said that she’d spoken to the hospital and been told that Blerim Dost was in a stable condition. His room was still being guarded. Joni added that none of the Albanian women had been spotted overnight. ‘After we’ve been to Alnwick, we’ll stop off to interview Nick Etherington again,’ she concluded. ‘I’m sure he saw something at the brothel that he hasn’t come clean about.’
Ruth Dickie kept silent, so Heck nodded to DI Sutton.
Unlike Pancake Rokeby, Morrie loved spouting to the gathered masses. The problem was, he had absolutely no talent for it. After several minutes of chaotic rambling, Heck cut in. The upshot was that DI Sutton was told to intensify the search for witnesses and for the missing female suspect, while DS Gray was assigned to liaising with the SOCOs and the lab over their findings in Burwell Street. DC Eileen Andrews – short, plump, in her mid-forties and with a look of mild amusement permanently on her soft face – was asked about her trawl of the databases.
‘The Border Agency has Leka Asllani, Blerim Dost and the man last seen with a fork in his forehead—’
‘Elez Zymberi,’ Joni supplied.
‘All the zeds, DI Pax,’ Andrews said, smiling. ‘As I was saying, the UKBA has the three of them plus the six women as having overstayed their ninety-day visas. Apart from that, none of them appear in HOLMES or any of the other databases.’
‘Is it worth giving Interpol their names and mugshots?’ Heck mused.
‘Hold off on that,’ the ACC said. ‘We need to build more of a case.’ She looked at him. ‘On the other hand, DCI Rutherford, you should talk to your former colleagues in Newcastle – see if the names mean anything to them.’
Heck’s shoulders slumped. He’d suspected she would suggest that.
37
Suzana had spent the rest of the night in a park. The walls of what she took to be an old church were bathed in yellow light about a kilometre away. The red coat, almost like the cloaks the women in her village wore in winter, kept her warm and the wide-brimmed hat protected her head from the drops of dew that fell from the trees. She woke early and thought about what to do. The longer she stayed in this town, the greater the chance of being found by Leka’s friends. She was hoping he and the other pigs in the slave house would be out of action for a long time if they weren’t dead. But leaving would bring its own dangers. Taking a bus or a train – she used to hear the sound of engines and carriages clacking from her room – would mean that other people would see her, other people who might talk. She could have tried to whore herself on the roadside, but she’d vowed that no man would ever touch her again. So she had to walk; but before that she needed to locate this Cor-ham place on a map and decide where to go. Then there were the bags of provisions. She needed somewhere to hide them after she’d eaten again.
Rolling up the coat, Suzana hid it and the bags behind a thick bush. She kept the hat on as, combined with the good-quality leather jacket, it made her look less like a person who lived on the streets. Her feet were still painful, but they were better than yesterday, as was the wound on her upper chest. As long as she kept the jacket buttoned, she would not attract too much attention. If she opened it, the sour stench of sweat and men’s fluids would cause people to gag. Heading for the town centre was risky, and not only because of the Albanians. The police would be looking for her too. She knew that stabbing men wouldn’t be seen as acceptable, no matter what had been done to her. She’d been brought up to understand that women did what they were told, respecting the superiority of their fathers, brothers and husbands. She did not think things would be so different in England.
For all that, a man with a small white dog said something to her in a friendly voice as she left the park. She kept her head down and mumbled som
ething in return, keen to fit in. The buildings around here were smaller than the one with the small wooden house, but not as shabby as the ones in the streets around the slave house. There were trees and in daylight she saw that the leaves were bright green and that buds had begun to appear. She looked up at the sky. High cloud in narrow white strips – what her grandfather on her father’s side called ‘goose-feather heaven’.
There were few people around – did they stay in their beds so late? Then it struck her. Living in towns meant you didn’t have to rise with the sun to tend the animals. Why did they put ropes around their dogs’ necks? In the village they ran free, scavenging for food and receiving savage beatings if they nipped the goats and sheep. Here it seemed people looked after them. Why would they do that at the same time as depriving the creatures of their freedom? Truly this was a strange country.
She came to a wide road with cars moving slowly. The few vehicles in her village were driven as if they were in a race, even the big tractors that had appeared in recent years. Young men rode motorbikes with their heads lowered, never with the helmets she saw in Cor-ham and always at full speed. Two of her cousins had been killed, one hitting a wall and the other catapulting into a ravine. It had taken the men a whole day to bring his body back for burial.
Suzana came to the first shop. It was closed, but she stood at the window, her eyes wide. She had never seen so many toys: dolls, grown-up dolls with short skirts and huge hair like the street women in Tirana, trains and cars for boys. In the corner was a house nearly as tall as she was, with furniture in every room and tiny plates and cups on the tables. There was even a toilet like the one in the slave house. The first time she had used one like that was in the airport. She had asked one of the other girls, who told her to put her feet on the seat and squat. Was that what fat men and old women did too, she wondered. Leka had laughed when she climbed up on the seat in the bathroom down the corridor from her room. ‘Put your skinny ass on the plastic, bitch,’ he said. ‘You’re not a peasant now.’
No, she’d been something much worse: a plaything of men; a doll like the ones in the shop, despite her lank hair and pale skin; a vessel for their seed. She looked around, suddenly afraid that she stood out. But people walked past, the younger ones paying little attention to her and the older ones giving her tentative smiles. She nodded to them, wishing she could respond to their words. She didn’t even know how to say ‘Good day’ in English.
Moving on, Suzana came to a street full of shops and restaurants. There was a stone column in the middle of a broad square and, beneath it, a map in a plastic display case. She headed for it, jumping at the horn blast from a car and ready to bolt. The man at the wheel shook his head at her and drove on. She berated herself. This is not the mountains. Here there are many vehicles. Be careful, idiot.
She spent a quarter of an hour making sense of the map. Beside it was a tall post with signs at different heights, pointing in various directions. She followed them with her eyes and spoke the names under her breath.
‘Cor-ham Ab-bey. Riv-er Der-wyne. Tan-ning and Dis-tilling Mus-e-um. Ra-il-way Sta-ti-on. Bus Sta-ti-on. I-ron-flatts.’ She didn’t understand the words, but she found where they were on the map, seeing pictures of a train, a bus and three bridges. She worked out the location of the riverside park where she’d spent her first night of freedom. There was a red dot in the Ma-in Squ-ar-e. She realised that was where she was standing. She memorised as much as she could. Having been to school with one teacher for all the classes and very few books or writing materials, she had come to rely on her memory. In recent months it had grown weak from lack of use, but now she had a purpose. She would sharpen her memory and every other part of her mind. They would be some of her most important weapons.
That reminded her. The small plastic-covered knife she’d taken from the wooden house was in her pocket, but she needed something more lethal. Looking around and waiting until there was a gap in the increasing flow of cars, Suzana crossed back to the shops and looked for one that sold knives. She’d began to lose hope when, on a road leading to the river, she found a place with not only knives in the window, but also screwdrivers, pliers and other tools.
She went in to stock up.
38
‘That was a waste of time,’ DS Rokeby said as he and Joni Pax came out of Alnwick Police Station.
‘Mm,’ his boss replied absently. She was looking at the walls that rose above the town. ‘What is that place, Pete?’ She never used his nickname – never seemed to use anyone’s if she could avoid it. That made him uncomfortable about calling her Jack or Jackie Brown behind her back, as some of the others did.
‘Alnwick Castle. Where they filmed Harry Potter.’
She looked at him blankly.
‘Haven’t you read the books? The films have been on the telly.’ Then Pete Rokeby remembered. He’d experienced Joni Pax’s ignorance about popular culture before. He put it down to her being an Oxford graduate, the fact that she didn’t know much about black culture reinforcing that conclusion. ‘Sorry, I forgot you only watch the news.’
‘And the Proms.’ They reached the Land Rover. Joni tossed him the keys. ‘You drive. I know you’ve been desperate to get your hands on her.’ After she’d strapped herself in, fumbling with the passenger seat belt, she sat back and nodded as he successfully manipulated the gears. ‘Yes, you’re right. Visiting Mr Hekuran Kondi was probably not the best way to spend our morning.’
The Albanian hadn’t responded to her attempts in Italian, while one of Richard Lennox’s junior lawyers sat in, shaking her head when the questions were voiced in English. Kondi was in his late twenties, Joni estimated. He had no ID on him apart from a gym card, though his wallet was full of cash.
‘On the other hand,’ Rokeby said, manouevring through the narrow streets, ‘you did seem to touch a nerve. What did he say when he gave you that look?’
Joni thought back to the stocky man with the clippered hair and dark-ringed eyes. His voice had been low and emotionless. ‘He said that I would be raped and murdered.’
‘What?’ the DS said, glancing at her, then looking to the front and correcting his course. ‘You should have told the lawyer.’
‘I didn’t want her to know.’
‘Why the hell not?’
‘Because that wasn’t all he said. I told him that the missing woman had been too much for his friends in Corham, having killed one, sent another to intensive care and stuck a fork in the third guy’s head. What kind of men were they, I asked. Child fuckers?’
Pete Rokeby shook his head. ‘You fight dirty, ma’am. So what else did he say?’
‘He let slip a name.’ Joni glanced at him. ‘The Popi. He said the Popi would fix me. Mean anything to you?’
‘Afraid not. Albanian gangs weren’t on my agenda in Newcastle.’
Joni called Heck Rutherford. He didn’t know the name either, but would run it past his former colleagues.
‘Actually,’ she said, as they headed back down the A1, ‘I have an admission to make.’
‘Oh aye?’
‘Em, aye. Child fuckers wasn’t the only thing I called the Albanians.’
Rokeby looked at her and laughed. ‘Let me guess. You used some choice homophobic terms.’
Joni nodded, her eyes down. ‘Sorry about that. I read in an Italian criminology article that Albanian mafiosi have a thing about gays. A thing as in “they hate their guts”.’
‘Chill, ma’am,’ the DS said, laughing. ‘What did you actually say?’
‘Well … I said I thought they must have been busy sticking their pencil-thin dicks in each other’s soft pink anuses.’
This time Pete Rokeby guffawed loudly. ‘I love it! Don’t worry, it was in the line of duty.’ He glanced at her. ‘We Pofnee minorities need to stick together.’
Joni watched as a flock of small birds rose up and banked over a small wood. ‘Are you talking about my colour, my gender or my sexual orientation?’
‘Em, the
first two.’ The MCU had been rife with speculation about Joni Pax’s sex life since she’d arrived. No one had seen her with a partner of either sex.
‘To tell you the truth, I don’t see myself as belonging to a minority on either count. Obviously there are fewer women in Pofnee than there should be, but the statistics show there are more women than men in the world. And, if you count most of the occupants of Africa and the eastern continents, you’ll have a pretty large number of black people.’
Pete Rokeby accelerated past a lorry. ‘But there aren’t many blacks in Pofnee. I think you’re the only detective if you discount people of Indian and Pakistani origin.’
‘The chief constable would say that the police force should reflect the make-up of the local population. I haven’t seen many black people in Corham, let alone in rural Northumberland.’
‘True. Then again, gays make up between six and twenty per cent of the population, depending whose statistics you believe. I only know three other gays in Pofnee and two of them are lesbians.’
Joni laughed softly. ‘Gays can keep their orientation to themselves. They probably have to in the more macho units. I don’t have that choice, either as a woman or a person of colour.’
‘So what you’re saying is that different minorities shouldn’t stick together?’ Rokeby said testily.
‘No, of course not.’ She pointed ahead. ‘Why don’t we follow that sign and get something to eat?’
They found themselves at a pub called the Yellow Cat. A chalked board claimed it did the best value meals in the county.
‘We can always do them under the Trades Descriptions Act if it’s shite,’ Pete Rokeby said. He parked and handed over the Discovery’s keys.
They ordered toasted ciabatta sandwiches, Joni’s with grilled vegetables and the DS’s with spicy sausage.
‘Good enough,’ Rokeby said, after he’d finished well ahead of Joni and drained his pint of lemonade.
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